Luca Surian
Biographic Data
| ID | 950129 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Luca Surian |
| GIVEN NAMES | Luca |
| FAMILY NAME | Surian |
| SIGNATURE | SURIAN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Trento |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6463-2953 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
‘You reap what you sow’: Infants expect that negative events happen to antisocial agents
Preschoolers, but not yet toddlers, prefer to allocate epistemic trust to leaders than to bullies
From toddlerhood, children distinguish respect-based from fear-based power. We tested if, and at what age, epistemic trust is modulated by the type of social power displayed by informants. Italian children ( N = 445; age range: 1.5–10 years) and adults ( N = 32; age range: 18–39) were presented with a leader-character and a bully-character, each labeling a different novel object with the same novel word (“zaffo”). When asked to identify the zaffo…
Role of Theory of Mind in children’s derivation of ad hoc conversational implicatures
Previous literature suggests that four-year-old children can derive ad hoc scalar implicatures, but it remains unclear whether they do so by taking into account the speaker’s perspective. This research investigated this issue by testing children’s ability to derive ad hoc implicatures in conditions in which the speaker had either a false or a true belief about relevant aspects of the communicative context. The participants were typically developi…
Deafness, Hearing Loss and the Development of Mental State Reasoning Skills: A Review
Individuals with hearing loss have a diverse spectrum of auditory experiences, shaped by the degree of hearing loss and interventions. The study of social cognition in deaf children and more generally, children with hearing loss, contributes to a nuanced understanding of how learning experiences influence social and cognitive development. Research suggests that limited access to language may influence conceptual development in theory of mind or t…
How speaker cooperation and knowledge prime scalar implicatures
Pragmatic theories generally agree that the derivation of implicit meaning depends on the assumption that the speaker is cooperative and knowledgeable, as well as the contextual relevance of the implicature. Studies on scalar implicature priming have investigated the latter, but the influence of the first two factors remains understudied. Here, we investigated the effect of the presence (or absence) of a cooperative and knowledgeable interlocutor…
What goes around comes around: Foreign language use increases immanent justice thinking
Core Moral Concepts and the Sense of Fairness in Human Infants
We review recent experimental studies relevant to assess the proposal that human infants possess a sense of fairness that relies on sociomoral knowledge. We propose that this knowledge may include a core concept of justice with four foundational aspects: impartiality, agency, obligatoriness and conflicting claims. Infants' and toddlers' looking times, manual preferences and spontaneous actions provide some evidence for the first three features. V…
Ad-Hoc Conversational Implicatures in Two-Year-Olds
Young children’s (n = 108) and adults’ (n = 40) ability to compute ad-hoc quantity conversational implicatures was assessed using a new implicit task that relied on eye-tracking. The children were 2 and 5 years old. Looking times reveal that all participants interpreted simple references by relying on implicatures. However, 2-year-olds failed to derive standard ad-hoc implicatures and succeeded only on a novel type of implicature based on typical…
The implicit perception of harm following moral violations in autism
Previous studies showed that when reading a scenario depicting a harmless moral violation in the domain of purity, people nevertheless implicitly infer that harm was involved. In this study, we assessed whether this “implicit completion” process found in the perception of immoral actions is also present in people with autism spectrum disorder. In two experiments, we found an implicit activation of harm representations in response to all kinds of …
Judging accidental harm: Due care and foreseeability of side effects
Both in philosophy and in cognitive psychology, models of moral judgment posit that individuals take into account both agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes. The present research focused on a third crucial piece of information, agents’ negligence. In Study 1, participants judged the moral wrongness and punishability of agents’ actions that resulted in negative side effects. In the scenarios, we orthogonally manipulated whether the agent acted …
Infants' preferences for approachers over repulsers shift between 4 and 8 months of age
Despite its adaptive value for social life, the emergence and the development of the ability to detect agents that cause aversive interactions and distinguish them from potentially affiliative agents (approachers) has not been investigated. We presented infants with a simple interaction involving two agents: one of them (the “repulser”) moved toward and pushed the other (the “approacher”) which reacted by simply moving toward the repulser without…
Do children selectively trust leaders and prosocial agents in an economic exchange
Most cooperative interactions involve interpersonal trust and the expectation of mutual reciprocation. Thus, understanding when and how humans acquire interpersonal trust can help unveil the origins and development of children's cooperative behavior. Here, we investigated whether prior sociomoral information about trading partners modulates the choice of preschool (4-5 years) and school-age children (7-8 years) to share their own goods in a child…
Question framing effects and the processing of the moral–conventional distinction
Prominent theories in moral psychology maintain that a core aspect of moral competence is the ability to distinguish moral norms, which derive from universal principles of justice and fairness, from conventional norms, which are contingent on a specific group consensus. The present study investigated the psychological bases of the moral-conventional distinction by manipulating the framing of the test question, the authority’s license, and the his…
Scalar and ad-hoc pragmatic inferences in children: Guess which one is easier
Several studies investigated preschoolers’ ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 ( N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children's pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection t…
Toddlers' expectations of third‐party punishments and rewards following an act of aggression
Rewarding someone who defends the victim of an unjust aggression and punishing someone who chose not to defend her may be very important acts of reciprocation in social life. This study investigates whether 21‐month‐olds have some expectations concerning such punishing and rewarding actions. Infants were shown simple puppet shows and were tested using the violation‐of‐expectation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found that infants looked longer when…
On the interpretation of scalar implicatures in first and second language
Lexical stress contrastivity in Italian children with autism spectrum disorders: An exploratory acoustic study
We investigated production of lexical stress in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD), all monolingual Italian speakers. The mean age of the 16 autistic children was 5.73 years and the mean age of the 16 typically developing children was 4.65 years. Picture-naming targets were five trisyllabic words that began with a weak–strong pattern of lexical stress across the initial two syllables (WS: matita ) and five trisyllabic words…
Toddlers map the word ‘good’ to helping agents, but not to fair distributors
Infants begin to understand some of the meanings of the adjective good at around thirteen months, but it is not clear when they start to map it to concepts in the moral domain. We investigated infants’ and toddlers’ knowledge of good in the domains of help and fairness. Participants at 20 and 30 months were shown computer animations involving helpful and hindering agents, or agents who performed fair or unfair distributions, and were asked to “pi…
Infants’ evaluation of prosocial and antisocial agents: A meta-analysis
16 suggested a file-drawer problem. (PsycINFO Database Record
Preverbal Infants' Ability to Encode the Outcome of Distributive Actions
This research examined whether 10‐month‐old infants expect agents to perform equal distribution of resources. In Experiment 1, infants saw a distributor performing either an equal distribution where one strawberry was given to each of two recipients, or an unequal distribution that favored one of the recipients. Infants looked longer at the unequal test event, suggesting that they expected the strawberries to be distributed equally. In Experiment…
The Foreign Language Effect on Moral Judgment: The Role of Emotions and Norms
We investigated whether and why the use of a foreign language influences moral judgment. We studied the trolley and footbridge dilemmas, which propose an action that involves killing one individual to save five. In line with prior work, the use of a foreign language increased the endorsement of such consequentialist actions for the footbridge dilemma, but not for the trolley dilemma. But contrary to recent theorizing, this effect was not driven b…
How foreign language shapes moral judgment
The developmental roots of fairness: infants’ reactions to equal and unequal distributions of resources: Evaluation of fairness of distributive actions
The problem of how to distribute available resources among members of a group is a central aspect of social life. Adults react negatively to inequitable distributions and several studies have reported negative reactions to inequity also in non-human primates and dogs. We report two experiments on infants' reactions to equal and unequal distributions. In two experiments, infants' looking times and manual choices provide, for the first time, conver…
Sensitivity to conversational maxims in deaf and hearing children
We investigated whether access to a sign language affects the development of pragmatic competence in three groups of deaf children aged 6 to 11 years: native signers from deaf families receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction, native signers from deaf families receiving oralist instruction and late signers from hearing families receiving oralist instruction. The performance of these children was compared to a group of hearing children aged 6 to 7 …
Foreknowledge, caring, and the side-effect effect in young children
Children and adults often judge that the side effects of the actions of an uncaring story agent have been intentional if the effects are harmful but not if these are beneficial, creating an asymmetrical "side-effect" effect. The authors report 3 experiments involving 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 188) designed to clarify the role of foreknowledge and caring in judgments of intentionality. Many children showed the side-effect effect even if agents were …
How foreign language shapes moral judgment
Language access and theory of mind reasoning: Evidence from deaf children in bilingual and oralist environments
This investigation examined whether access to sign language as a medium for instruction influences theory of mind (ToM) reasoning in deaf children with similar home language environments. Experiment 1 involved 97 deaf Italian children ages 4-12 years: 56 were from deaf families and had LIS (Italian Sign Language) as their native language, and 41 had acquired LIS as late signers following contact with signers outside their hearing families. Childr…
On the interpretation of scalar implicatures in first and second language
Infants' preferences for approachers over repulsers shift between 4 and 8 months of age
Despite its adaptive value for social life, the emergence and the development of the ability to detect agents that cause aversive interactions and distinguish them from potentially affiliative agents (approachers) has not been investigated. We presented infants with a simple interaction involving two agents: one of them (the “repulser”) moved toward and pushed the other (the “approacher”) which reacted by simply moving toward the repulser without…
Foreknowledge, caring, and the side-effect effect in young children
Children and adults often judge that the side effects of the actions of an uncaring story agent have been intentional if the effects are harmful but not if these are beneficial, creating an asymmetrical "side-effect" effect. The authors report 3 experiments involving 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 188) designed to clarify the role of foreknowledge and caring in judgments of intentionality. Many children showed the side-effect effect even if agents were …
Toddlers' expectations of third‐party punishments and rewards following an act of aggression
Rewarding someone who defends the victim of an unjust aggression and punishing someone who chose not to defend her may be very important acts of reciprocation in social life. This study investigates whether 21‐month‐olds have some expectations concerning such punishing and rewarding actions. Infants were shown simple puppet shows and were tested using the violation‐of‐expectation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found that infants looked longer when…
Infants’ evaluation of prosocial and antisocial agents: A meta-analysis
16 suggested a file-drawer problem. (PsycINFO Database Record
Lies, Mistakes, and Blessings: Defining and Characteristic Features in Conceptual Development
In this study, we examined the extent to which young children can be influenced by the perceived blessed status of an actor in their evaluations of behavior as a lie or mistake. Children aged 4 and 5 years attending Catholic schools in an urban center in Northern Italy were provided with a situation in which two girls in church were blessed with holy water ("blessed condition") or shook the priest's hand ("not blessed"). The girls were then place…
Do children selectively trust leaders and prosocial agents in an economic exchange
Most cooperative interactions involve interpersonal trust and the expectation of mutual reciprocation. Thus, understanding when and how humans acquire interpersonal trust can help unveil the origins and development of children's cooperative behavior. Here, we investigated whether prior sociomoral information about trading partners modulates the choice of preschool (4-5 years) and school-age children (7-8 years) to share their own goods in a child…
Children's use of conversational rules in a referential communication task
Do children exploit the Maxim of Antecedent in order to interpret ambiguous descriptions
Twenty Italian six-year-olds and 20 eight-year-olds were asked to interpret eight ambiguous and eight clear definite descriptions. All ambiguous descriptions could refer to three drawings, one of which had been described by the subjects immediately before the comprehension task. In half of the trials with ambiguous messages the children's interlocutor was present while the children were describing the drawings; in the other half he was absent. In…
Mental effort and the development of definite descriptions
Children's ambiguous utterances: A re-examination of processing limitations on production
The ability to convey the optimal amount of information during conversation is a fundamental aspect of language use. In this study the relationship between children's failures to produce unambiguous utterances and the mental effort demands of the communication task was investigated. Five-, six-, seven- and nine-year-old children performed a message production task and a finger-tapping task both separately and simultaneously. The decrease in finge…
Lies, Mistakes, and Blessings: Defining and Characteristic Features in Conceptual Development
In this study, we examined the extent to which young children can be influenced by the perceived blessed status of an actor in their evaluations of behavior as a lie or mistake. Children aged 4 and 5 years attending Catholic schools in an urban center in Northern Italy were provided with a situation in which two girls in church were blessed with holy water ("blessed condition") or shook the priest's hand ("not blessed"). The girls were then place…
Attribution of Beliefs by 13-Month-Old Infants
In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way that is consistent with information to which they have been exposed. Infants watched animations in which an animal was either provided information or prevented from gathering information about the actual location of an object. The animal then searched successfully or failed to retrieve the object. Infants' looking times suggest that they expected sea…
Language access and theory of mind reasoning: Evidence from deaf children in bilingual and oralist environments
This investigation examined whether access to sign language as a medium for instruction influences theory of mind (ToM) reasoning in deaf children with similar home language environments. Experiment 1 involved 97 deaf Italian children ages 4-12 years: 56 were from deaf families and had LIS (Italian Sign Language) as their native language, and 41 had acquired LIS as late signers following contact with signers outside their hearing families. Childr…
Foreknowledge, caring, and the side-effect effect in young children
Children and adults often judge that the side effects of the actions of an uncaring story agent have been intentional if the effects are harmful but not if these are beneficial, creating an asymmetrical "side-effect" effect. The authors report 3 experiments involving 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 188) designed to clarify the role of foreknowledge and caring in judgments of intentionality. Many children showed the side-effect effect even if agents were …
Sensitivity to conversational maxims in deaf and hearing children
We investigated whether access to a sign language affects the development of pragmatic competence in three groups of deaf children aged 6 to 11 years: native signers from deaf families receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction, native signers from deaf families receiving oralist instruction and late signers from hearing families receiving oralist instruction. The performance of these children was compared to a group of hearing children aged 6 to 7 …
The developmental roots of fairness: infants’ reactions to equal and unequal distributions of resources: Evaluation of fairness of distributive actions
The problem of how to distribute available resources among members of a group is a central aspect of social life. Adults react negatively to inequitable distributions and several studies have reported negative reactions to inequity also in non-human primates and dogs. We report two experiments on infants' reactions to equal and unequal distributions. In two experiments, infants' looking times and manual choices provide, for the first time, conver…
The Foreign Language Effect on Moral Judgment: The Role of Emotions and Norms
We investigated whether and why the use of a foreign language influences moral judgment. We studied the trolley and footbridge dilemmas, which propose an action that involves killing one individual to save five. In line with prior work, the use of a foreign language increased the endorsement of such consequentialist actions for the footbridge dilemma, but not for the trolley dilemma. But contrary to recent theorizing, this effect was not driven b…
How foreign language shapes moral judgment
Preverbal Infants' Ability to Encode the Outcome of Distributive Actions
This research examined whether 10‐month‐old infants expect agents to perform equal distribution of resources. In Experiment 1, infants saw a distributor performing either an equal distribution where one strawberry was given to each of two recipients, or an unequal distribution that favored one of the recipients. Infants looked longer at the unequal test event, suggesting that they expected the strawberries to be distributed equally. In Experiment…
Infants’ evaluation of prosocial and antisocial agents: A meta-analysis
16 suggested a file-drawer problem. (PsycINFO Database Record
Toddlers map the word ‘good’ to helping agents, but not to fair distributors
Infants begin to understand some of the meanings of the adjective good at around thirteen months, but it is not clear when they start to map it to concepts in the moral domain. We investigated infants’ and toddlers’ knowledge of good in the domains of help and fairness. Participants at 20 and 30 months were shown computer animations involving helpful and hindering agents, or agents who performed fair or unfair distributions, and were asked to “pi…
Lexical stress contrastivity in Italian children with autism spectrum disorders: An exploratory acoustic study
We investigated production of lexical stress in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD), all monolingual Italian speakers. The mean age of the 16 autistic children was 5.73 years and the mean age of the 16 typically developing children was 4.65 years. Picture-naming targets were five trisyllabic words that began with a weak–strong pattern of lexical stress across the initial two syllables (WS: matita ) and five trisyllabic words…
Question framing effects and the processing of the moral–conventional distinction
Prominent theories in moral psychology maintain that a core aspect of moral competence is the ability to distinguish moral norms, which derive from universal principles of justice and fairness, from conventional norms, which are contingent on a specific group consensus. The present study investigated the psychological bases of the moral-conventional distinction by manipulating the framing of the test question, the authority’s license, and the his…
Scalar and ad-hoc pragmatic inferences in children: Guess which one is easier
Several studies investigated preschoolers’ ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 ( N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children's pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection t…
Toddlers' expectations of third‐party punishments and rewards following an act of aggression
Rewarding someone who defends the victim of an unjust aggression and punishing someone who chose not to defend her may be very important acts of reciprocation in social life. This study investigates whether 21‐month‐olds have some expectations concerning such punishing and rewarding actions. Infants were shown simple puppet shows and were tested using the violation‐of‐expectation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found that infants looked longer when…
On the interpretation of scalar implicatures in first and second language
Judging accidental harm: Due care and foreseeability of side effects
Both in philosophy and in cognitive psychology, models of moral judgment posit that individuals take into account both agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes. The present research focused on a third crucial piece of information, agents’ negligence. In Study 1, participants judged the moral wrongness and punishability of agents’ actions that resulted in negative side effects. In the scenarios, we orthogonally manipulated whether the agent acted …
Infants' preferences for approachers over repulsers shift between 4 and 8 months of age
Despite its adaptive value for social life, the emergence and the development of the ability to detect agents that cause aversive interactions and distinguish them from potentially affiliative agents (approachers) has not been investigated. We presented infants with a simple interaction involving two agents: one of them (the “repulser”) moved toward and pushed the other (the “approacher”) which reacted by simply moving toward the repulser without…
Do children selectively trust leaders and prosocial agents in an economic exchange
Most cooperative interactions involve interpersonal trust and the expectation of mutual reciprocation. Thus, understanding when and how humans acquire interpersonal trust can help unveil the origins and development of children's cooperative behavior. Here, we investigated whether prior sociomoral information about trading partners modulates the choice of preschool (4-5 years) and school-age children (7-8 years) to share their own goods in a child…
Ad-Hoc Conversational Implicatures in Two-Year-Olds
Young children’s (n = 108) and adults’ (n = 40) ability to compute ad-hoc quantity conversational implicatures was assessed using a new implicit task that relied on eye-tracking. The children were 2 and 5 years old. Looking times reveal that all participants interpreted simple references by relying on implicatures. However, 2-year-olds failed to derive standard ad-hoc implicatures and succeeded only on a novel type of implicature based on typical…
The implicit perception of harm following moral violations in autism
Previous studies showed that when reading a scenario depicting a harmless moral violation in the domain of purity, people nevertheless implicitly infer that harm was involved. In this study, we assessed whether this “implicit completion” process found in the perception of immoral actions is also present in people with autism spectrum disorder. In two experiments, we found an implicit activation of harm representations in response to all kinds of …
Psychology (29 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (19 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Developmental psychology (15 works) · Linguistics (12 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (11 works) · Cognitive psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Cognition (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works)